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Topic: Sharpless 264 - what a whopper! (Read 199 times)

This is my first image of 2018 - into the second month, what rotten weather we had here in NE England. Mainly cloud, but to add insult to injury, when clear a very bright Moon.

Situated at the top of the main Orion asterism (that's Betelgeuse and Bellatrix at the bottom of the image), Sharpless 264 spans a whopping 6 1/2 degrees. If one assumes a distance of 1500 light years, that makes it 170 light years across! I started trying to capture this in December 2017, but was constantly foiled by cloud. Eventually I managed to get some data on 21st. January and the rest on 6th February 2018. QSI683 on Canon 70-200L zoom lens at approximately 85 mm focal length. 13 x 20 minutes H-alpha (for luminance and colour) plus 5 x 20 minutes each OIII and SII. But very little colour in the latter two, so I've used H-alpha in the Red channel. Often known as the 'Alien Face'.

It's interesting, in particular for this object, that there are so many clouds of gas out there, totally invisible to the naked eye. How many times over millenia have people looked at Orion, and never seen this despite it's size, or for that matter Barnard's Loop? It is only with the advent of suitable optics, film and now sensitive detectors that we can actually 'see' these amazing structures. I doubt if anyone living within such clouds would be aware of them except as perhaps an extremely faint background glow in the sky.

But how many of you have read Fred Hoyle's 'The Black Cloud'? Pause for thought...